Wednesday, 18 January 2012

The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

This post has already gone up twice; but, as it's the one on which I worked hardest, and as this blog is always gaining and losing adherents, I see no reason not to wheel it out for a third time. As the Bellman remarked, "What I tell you three times is true".

The idea of the post is simple. When you type a phrase into Google, Google tells you how many hits that phrase gets on the Internet, or how many pages contained that exact line.

It should be stated before we begin that Google is, for a computer program, often strangely illogical and inconsistent, but it's the best we've got. The number of hits is listed after the line. Click on the author's name for the full poem.

Counting down from number fifty...

50.The mind is its own place, and in itself/[Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n]403,000Milton49.Full fathom five thy father lies438,000Shakespeare48.If you can keep your head when all about you447,000Kipling47. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways467,000Elizabeth Barrett Browning46.If music be the food of love, play on507,000Shakespeare45.We few, we happy few, we band of brothers521,000Shakespeare44.What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare528,000W.H. Davies43.The moving finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on571,000Edward Fitzgerald42.They also serve who only stand and wait584,000Milton41.The quality of mercy is not strained589,000Shakespeare40.In Xanadu did Kubla Khan594,000Coleridge39.Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears615,000Shakespeare38.Shall I compare thee to a summers day638,000Shakespeare37.Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness641,000Keats36.A thing of beauty is a joy forever649,000Keats35.Do not go gentle into that good night665,000Dylan Thomas34.Busy old fool, unruly sun675,000John Donne33.Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone741,000Auden32.Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality891,000T.S. Eliot31.O Romeo, Romeo; wherefore art thou Romeo912,000Shakespeare30.The lady doth protest too much, methinks929,000Shakespeare29.The old lie: Dulce et Decorum Est990,000Wilfred Owen28.Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose1,050,000Gertrude Stein27.When I am an old woman I shall wear purple1,060,000Jenny Joseph26.I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree. 1,080,000Joyce Kilmer25.Hope springs eternal in the human breast 1,080,000Alexander Pope24.When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes1,100,000Shakespeare23.I grow old... I grow old.../I shall wear the bottoms of my trousersrolled1,140,000T.S. Eliot22.'The time has come', the Walrus said,/'To talk of many things'1,300,000Lewis Carroll21.A narrow fellow in the grass1,310,000Emily Dickinson20.Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all1,470,000Keats19.To be or not to be: that is the question1,640,000Shakespeare18.In Flanders fields the poppies blow 1,640,000John McCrae17. The proper study of mankind is man 1,770,000Alexander Pope16.A little learning is a dangerous thing1,860,000Alexander Pope15.But at my back I always hear2,010,000Marvell14.Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker2,150,000Ogden Nash13.My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun2,230,000Shakespeare12.Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold2,330,000W.B.Yeats11.Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me 2,360,000Emily Dickinson10.Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all2,400,000Tennyson9.Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair3,080,000Shelley8.To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield3,140,000Tennyson7.Tread softly because you tread on my dreams4,860,000W.B. Yeats6.Not with a bang but a whimper5,280,000T.S. Eliot5.And miles to go before I sleep5,350,000Robert Frost4.I wandered lonely as a cloud8,000,000Wordsworth3.The child is father of the man9,420,000Wordsworth2.I am the master of my fate14,700,000William Ernest Henley1.To err is human; to forgive, divine14,800,000Alexander Pope

Shakespeare doesn't make the top ten and Gertrude Stein is more quoted than Byron. Bet you didn't see that coming.

And many, many thanks to the Antipodean for these (click to enlarge):

Our rules were that:
1) it had to be a whole line of poetry (minimum 8 syllables) that
2) hadn't become famous as a title (e.g. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind)
3) or as a song (e.g. And did those feet in ancient time)
4) or is pretty exclusively for children (e.g. I do not like green eggs and ham).
5) The phrases were googled in "inverted commas", which gives you only pages with the precise phrase.
6) No more than one line per medium sized poem.
Originally I didn't allow tetrameters, or at least required a couplet, however "The child is father of the man" changed our minds as it's the second place on its own and nowhere when linked with the adjacent lines. These rules have been broken a few times at our discretion.P.S. Google is sometimes eccentric on the number of hits, which can vary by clicking refresh. This is because it keeps adjusting to deal with spam and people trying to fool Google in to high rankings for their page. So sometimes it does odd things with line-breaks or even gives more results when there are more words in the search, which is utterly illogical. They also seem to vary slightly by country. Robert Frost's lines dipped slightly (or I noted them down incorrectly). The final arbiter has to be what pops up on my screen when I try the line in inverted commas.P.P.S. Because of the demands of work, I shall not be able to leap upon corrections, suggestions and amendments with my usual predatory alacrity. These were measured back in February 2010 and may have changed. My attitude to such ructions and revolutions will be, I am afraid, utterly idle. I refer complainers to the Bellman.

The phrase "This is just to say" gives me 11,500,000 hits, and all of at least the first couple of pages are about the poem, although they're not all quotes of the poem. Unfortunately, that's such a common phrase that it's likely to occur in a lot of unrelated contexts.

The phrase "This is just to say" gives me 11,500,000 hits, and all of at least the first couple of pages are about the poem, although they're not all quotes of the poem. Unfortunately, that's such a common phrase that it's likely to occur in a lot of unrelated contexts.

Tazio, Edward FitzGerald translated Omar Khayyam's 'Rubaiyat' into English, and is known to have added to the original and changed it a great deal: the general rule now is to cite Fitzgerald as author in relation to his own version, since while Khayyam was his starting point, Fitzgerald remade the 'Rubaiyat' - other versions, credited to Khayyam, now exist in abundance, and don't feature the phrases that appear in Fitzgerald.

Looks to me like the Shakespeare lines are poetry, Other Anonymous. In the plays, main characters speak in blank verse. Only the peons speak in prose. All of the quotations from plays are from major speeches.

I think your methodology is fundamentally flawed, I'm afraid. As long as there are more than 1000 actual results, Google's estimated number of hits is based only on the words contained in the phrase you are searching for and is known to be very unreliable for multi-word queries: http://jis.sagepub.com/content/35/4/469.abstract http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/google-result-counts-are-a-meaningless-metric.html

Noting Jules' comment, a moderately independent methodology would be to use Google Ngram. At least there one knows that only the exact phrase will turn up. Also one can note historical changes. Unfortunately, the complete line requirement is not directly implementable because the dataset only contains up to "5-grams". A second distinction is that the corpus contains only published books, a rather different sample, of popularity with the sort of people who write books, instead of the broad popularity that is measured by your search (as it is in principle, rather than as it is in actuality, as noted by Jules).

1) It has to be a poem you are aware of so that they can all be entered individually.

2) To rule out the possibility of it becoming famous through another medium, you have to be aware of all instances of its being used in another medium. Forgive me for finding you fallible, but #27 is the name of a popular and oft-gifted book. From its Amazon reviews:

"Millions of women have taken its message to heart: it's OK to grow older; in fact it's terrific! "You're not getting older, just a little more purple." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

The research system is unreliable as, if you enter one line, say: "I think that I shall never see" you get 367,000,000 hits, whereas, just by adding "A poem lovely as a tree" by Alfred Joyce Kilmer, you get 16,200,000, but if you replace poem with "billboard", Ogden Nash, you'll still get 1,360,000. I haven't gone too far into the precise nature of the quotations but with the case of the first example only the first ten pages pertain to the Joyce Kilmer poem. It's an interesting exercise and, as the posts here show, very thought provoking!

Disputations! Protestations! Avaunt, alack, alas! I blather. Do you know, one of my personal favourites is oft-quoted by the reverable (not a word?) P.G. Wodehouse in his brilliant comic novels: something something in or with "wild surmise/silent upon a peak in Darien" referring to Cortez when first he spied the Pacific or Atlantic or something. And I can't even be bothered to Google it...

One I like:How many loved your moments of glad grace,And loved your beauty with love false or true;But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows of your changing face. By Yeats 'When you are old'

Taste the Elements of Eloquence

The Horologicon is out in America

The Horologicon is a book of the strangest and most beautiful words in the English language arranged by the hour of the day when you will really need them. Words for breakfast, for commuting, for working, for dining, for drinking and for getting lost on the way home. It runs from uhtceare (sadness before dawn) to curtain lecture (a telling off given by your spouse in bed). It's out all over the world and you can buy it from these lovely people: